Twelve Thousand Reasons Why Women's Tennis Has an Online Abuse Problem

A new report puts a hard number on the torrent of abusive posts aimed at female tennis players in 2025, and the figure — 12,000 posts in a single year — is drawing fresh calls for platform accountability.

Female tennis players were targeted by approximately 12,000 abusive social media posts during 2025, according to a new report.
The findings were published in July 2026 and covered the full 2025 playing calendar, from the Australian summer to the end-of-season stretch.
Women players received a disproportionately high share of the abuse compared with their male counterparts on tour.
The report's authors have called on social media platforms to do more to detect and remove targeted harassment of athletes.
The findings arrive as Wimbledon 2026 is underway, placing the issue at the centre of the sport's highest-profile fortnight.

The grass at Wimbledon is barely dry, and already the numbers coming out of a new abuse-tracking report are making the rounds in press boxes and player lounges alike. According to research cited by the BBC this week, female tennis players were on the receiving end of roughly 12,000 abusive social media posts across 2025 — one full season, from the hard courts of Melbourne to the last autumn indoor events — and the count lands with the kind of bluntness that is hard to contextualise away.

The report does not name every account, every tournament, or every player singled out. What it does is aggregate a year's worth of monitoring data into a figure that opponents of online abuse have been asking platforms to produce for years. Twelve thousand posts. That works out to more than 30 a day, every day, for 12 months.

Women players have long spoken about the particular flavour of abuse that lands in their mentions — gendered, appearance-focused, and often arriving in volume spikes after losses or contentious line calls. The report appears to confirm what many players have described anecdotally: the problem is not occasional and it is not random. It is sustained.

Platform accountability is where the conversation tends to stall. Detection tools exist; enforcement is the gap. The report's authors are pressing for faster removal timelines and better flagging mechanisms specifically calibrated for athletes in high-visibility sports.

The timing is not incidental. With Wimbledon 2026 in full swing and women's matches drawing some of the fortnight's biggest audiences, the issue has a fresh news hook and a ready audience. The next grand slam review period begins in January.